Is it possible to write a program in C that does nothing - not even taking up memory?

Question

This is a tricky C question asked in interview: Write a program that does nothing, not even taking up memory.

Is it possible to do so?

Answer 1

All programs use memory. When you run the program, the OS will set up an address space for the program, copy its arguments into its process space, give it a process ID and a thread, give it some file descriptors for I/O, etc. Even if your program immediately terminates you still use up this memory and CPU time.